Heimat is one of the cinema's most monumental works - it's a TV programme really, but no masterwork is perfect. Over 11 episodes Reitz tracks the course of 20th century German history, from 1918 to 1982, through the story of the inhabitants of the village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück region in the Rhineland. It focuses in particular on the extended Simon family, and Maria (Breuer) the woman who marries into them only for her husband, Paul, to walk off at the end of the first episode. Other than its extreme length what is most striking thing about Reitz's film is the way it switches between colour and black and white.

I can't deny I approached the 11 episodes and fifteen hours of Heimat with some trepidation. It was great back in the 80s, but telly has come on a bit since. Before the advent of HBO, The Sopranos and box set TV, quality TV didn’t have dragons, battles and gratuitous nudity and you didn’t binge watch it over a weekend. In the old days, quality TV was long and arduous and serious: you watched it at the time it was on (unless you knew how to set your video recorder), you sat still for it and after it had finished you waited, usually for a week for the next episode. In the 80s quality TV was The Singing Detective; Boys From The Blackstuff; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley's People and Heimat and you watched it on the BBC, usually 2, or you watched whatever crap was on ITV.

Reitz's epic is every bit as impressive as it was over three decades, as bold as you could wish it to be. It's not pacy, it doesn't hook you in, but it (mostly) glides through that running time. The story opens with Paul Simon's return from the trenches of WWI. It's a simple sequence: a man walks into a village, is greeted by his family and then people from the village gather in the kitchen and chat. Nothing to get excited about, but Reitz makes it a discretely bravura set piece. His blacksmith father is forging a horseshoe in black and white with the red of the hot metal blazing out from the surrounding monochrome. Once inside the kitchen, the movement of the camera, not showy but busy, gives the scene energy. In the centre of all the activity, Paul becomes detached from the discussion, becomes briefly distracted by an abrupt colour shot of fly paper. He then listens to an apparition of another villager who died on the Russian front. When you've got another 14+ hours to get through the first few minutes have to make a very strong case for the project and by the end of this kitchen sequence I think you'll all be on board. The opening fills you with the energy to complete the task ahead. It lays out all the piece's virtues: the striking visual colour scheme, that the straightforward dramatic focus on this family will be leavened by bits of fantasy and invention, that there will be a lightness of touch, that it will reward your perseverance.

The Nar Zees

Germany makes for a lively viewing platform for the twentieth century, even if it's mostly from the countryside away from the main action. The story begins with the aftermath of World War One, and the resentment at the unjust peace. The first episode whips through the decade after the war up to 1929. We get to know the people of the village, the fools, the dreamers, the schemers. And it's terrible because you know very soon some of them will be in uniforms and you dread the knowledge that these harmless types, flawed though many of them are, are heading towards something so terrible. You try to pick out who is going to be the biggest wrong 'uns and what it is in them that will see them fall.

The shock of the piece is in the second episode, where Nazism goes from nowhere to ubiquity almost instantly. In 1932, we hear someone mention National Socialism in a brothel, and almost in the very next scene in 1933, it has swept the nation. In Heimat, history is the thing you don't see coming.

Usually, in these kinds of historical epics, its growth would be carefully examined; we'd have characters involved in its early days and we'd have presaging speeches about what is approaching. Apart from some ruffians stoning the upstairs window of a Jew in the twenties, Reitz doesn't do that. Instead, it sets the scene for its sudden rise by presenting Germany as a country surviving the period of post-war austerity on little white lies and fantasy, ready to embrace much bigger lies and fantasies.

Black and white/ Colour.

You could lose hours trying to work out the thinking for choosing when to go with colour and when to go with black and white. I think the consensus is colour is reality, and black and white is memory. As the years pass colour slowly becomes more dominant. But this theory doesn't entirely fit. In a black and white sequence in 1933 the Nazi flags are presented in colour; a few years later colour countryside is home to a black and white concentration camp.

It works like a dream, mostly because the two don't fit together. When the same scene is presented in both formats the contrast between the two images is extreme. You crave the vivid colour, but there is a retreat, a security and comfort in the black and white. It seems to smooth things over.

There is no way we'd still be extolling the film's virtue if it was wholly in one or the other. When the series hits a few duller stretches in its post-war years it is what keeps it going. The surprise is that more directors haven't used it. Wim Wender's Wings Of Desire is the best and most obvious comparison, but he stuck to the rules: heaven was black and white, reality was colour, just as in A Matter Of Life and Death.

The Wilderness Years.

Heimat is something to rave about but there is a massive dip in quality in the second half. Heartbreakingly, the moment the Nazis begin to falter so does the film. An important character suffers an obvious and melodramatic fate that seems unworthy of the drama and less than he deserved. The episodes devoted to the return of Paul after the war from America and, especially to Maria's bastard son Little Herman, drag on beyond their interest. While the female cast members tend to go all the way through, the male roles are generally recast and it can make things seem disjointed. The Paul who returns after the war just doesn't bear any resemblance with the Paul who walked off at the end of episode one. I never really accepted him and resented the villagers for not seeing he was an imposter.

Ich bin nein Heimatern.

After making Heimat, Reitz could've done anything he wanted. He chose to make more Heimats. A sixties Heimat; an after-the-fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall Heimat; a fragmented Heimat, a 19th-century prequel Heimat. He got to be a bit of a bore with the Heimats. Enough already with the Heimats.

But while Germany has got a surfeit of Heimats, I want to know where our Heimat is? TV formats like The Office and The Weakest Link get flogged around the world until every country has one to call its own. Why don't we all have a Heimat? British TV has made numerous attempts at this kind of long-range, multi-decade state of the nation drama but even stuff like Our Friends In The North, fall way short of this.

Edgar Reitz Burrows.

Heimat came out of a period when a generation of young Germans was trying to make sense of Nazism, the whole I'd-like-to-apologise-for-my-country's-behaviour-in-the-war era. Heimat though isn't an apology. Rather it seeks to assert a new myth of German identity and pride to replace the Reich fantasies. Like the Nazis, it invests the German countryside with a spiritual resonance, that these glorious rolling hills and swaying fields of wheat are inherently good. To misquote Mel Brooks, these are the people who were out in the woods collecting berries between 1939 and 1945. They knew, but they didn't know. In Heimat, Nazism is a kind of children's crusade, a mass delusion that sucked up a gullible but fundamental innocent people.

Extras

I normally struggle to find a toss to give for how a film was made, but Heimat is such an extreme undertaking the extras are as anticipated as the main feature. Located on the sixth disc I did try jumping ahead to sample them when I was only halfway through. I got three minutes into Kubrick's producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan's appreciation and he blabbed the ending.

Disappointingly there isn't a proper making of. There are interviews with Reitz and main actress Breuer that give some background.

Other features:

‘Heimat – The Hunsruek Villages: Stories From The Film Locations’ Edgar Reitz’s 2-hour documentary ‘prologue’ to Heimat.An interview with Christian Reitz on the restoration of Heimat.A Visual Essay by Daniel Bird.50-page limited edition softcover book featuring liner notes by Carmen Gray, ‘The Collaboration with Gernot Roll' by Edgar Reitz and ‘Germany as Memory' by Anton Kaes.